I have configured a working cobbler system that successfully handles my bare metal server deployment and I'm going to start the configuration management issues using puppet (integrating it as much as possible with cobbler of course).

As it seems that on the net there are a number of sparse resources giving puppet recipes in a more or less complete set, I'm asking is someone can suggest a good and well tested set of puppet recipes that can be used as a strong starting point on which I can build my customization.

I'm looking for something well written, as simple as possible in order to be maintainable, possibly hack-less that can handle as much as possible the "standard" configurations of a server. Starting from that I'll will write my recipes, possibly specializing those already existing in order to fully handle every aspect of my servers.

My goal is to have machines that can safely formatted and reinstalled in minutes via cobbler+puppet, without human interaction.

3 Answers
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I don't believe there is a "standard base" of puppet. Based on my own experience, mailing list conversations, and analyzing many of the recipe collections on the internets, it appears everyone has different enough requirements that they just use the existing collections as examples. That's how my deployment has turned out.

In practice with puppet you generally adapt other people's ideas and build your own modules tailored for your organization rather than trying to make general purpose modules that fit everywhere. The recipes are just that, starting points for you to hack away. There is no such thing as the "standard" configurations of a server - that said if you want to do it there is a good chance David has done it first.

@mechcow: I know it thanks. I'm not looking for the "standard configuration of a server" (or a service, that is more likely), but same "base" configurations for "standard services". ie, apache, ssh, users, xen, etc ... a number of "commonly used things", I would not rediscover As puppet has an object-oriented-like appearance, I'm simply trying to find a good set of "base classes" to inherit from :)
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AlberTAug 11 '09 at 12:02